My name is Thom Tapley and I'm the director of operations. My career spans one year less than Mercedes' through all facets of the industry.
I think we might be able to provide the most assistance through a discussion on digital media. We've been seeped in that world for quite some time now.
I'm concerned when I hear the comment made earlier today that perhaps the CBC shouldn't spread itself too thin. The implication is that “too thin” might be the Internet aspect of things. We believe that the Internet is where it should be moving. The CBC will be able to reach the most consumers globally, but also be the voice of Canadians. It will enable a two-way dialogue between Canadians and the public broadcaster.
We've had a number of thoughts on how to go about that. We think who we discuss the changes with is very important--how the changes will take place and how to best address them. Although dialogues like these are very important, it might be useful to broaden them to include people who typically might not belong to or take part in these discussions--people like Chris Anderson, who wrote a book called The Long Tail. There are countless other theorists out there right now who have some interesting ideas.
Chris is particularly interesting, because we often refer to Canadian content as niche content. Part of The Long Tail study was that niche content wasn't able to make the return on investment that the hit model or Hollywood model was producing. So through the years they developed a hit model, where you put a whole bunch of marketing into a small number of films. Those films were hopefully very successful and created enough revenue to continue on with your business.
That didn't serve Canadian film very well, in particular film promotion, because we don't have the money Hollywood has to market films. Trish made the point earlier that if $100 million or $125 million is spread over all Canadian films for production and distribution, and now marketing, it's a very small amount of money to spend on marketing. However, if you took that $125 million and spent it to market one film, it would have a real opportunity in the international market.
We're not able to do that because the system is set up to individually market each project. But when you take an example like the CBC, if you start promoting that brand instead of the individual projects that are going to be produced, we think there are ways to leverage that to actually be competitive internationally and bring not just viewers in Canada to Canadian content, but global consumers to Canadian content.
There are a number of discussions we can have to sort of suss out ideas in that area, so we will close our presentation and hopefully be able to answer any of your questions on the subjects we talked about.